November 24 was long dubbed D-Day 2014. That’s nuclear disarmament for Iran, after years of painstaking negotiations.

As Monday’s deadline loomed, it concentrated diplomatic minds. US Secretary of State John Kerry and Iran’s foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif postponed planned departures from Vienna on Friday evening to extend face-to-face negotiations, not wanting to leave the details to high-level diplomats. 

In the end there was no agreement and talks were extended for another seven months with the aim of reaching a grand bargain by March 1.

Iran wants a deal to lift the severe economic sanctions that are curtailing its hard pressed economy, while the US-led 5+1 (UN security council permanent members plus Germany) negotiating team wants to shackle Iran’s nuclear program to halt any chance of a break out from civilian nuclear activities into a nuclear weapons programme.

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said after the talks: “In the nuclear issue, America and colonial European countries got together and did their best to bring the Islamic Republic to its knees, but they could not do so — and they will not be able to do so.” 

Iran has persistently denied that it has any military nuclear intentions, but the 5+1 countries point to the magnitude and scope of Iran’s various nuclear activities, arguing that such a significant programme is unnecessary for a purely civilian programme. 

Iran has only one commercial-scale reactor at Bushehr, designed by German engineering company Siemens and finished off by Russian nuclear expertise from state-supported company Rosatom.

Earlier this month Russia announced that Rosatom has agreed to build two new  nuclear plants for Iran, for which Russia will provide the enriched uranium fuel under International Atomic Energy Agency control, thus reducing future indigenous demand for Iranian uranium enrichment capacity.

The US provided Iran — then called Persia — with its first small research reactor, in 1957 under president Dwight Eisenhower’s Atoms-for-Peace support programme at a time when Iran was a strong US ally. 

President Gerald Ford took atomic co-operation further when he signed a directive in 1976 offering Iran the chance to buy and operate a US-built reprocessing facility for extracting plutonium from nuclear reactor fuel. The deal was for a complete nuclear fuel cycle. 

The Ford strategy paper said the “introduction of nuclear power will both provide for the growing needs of Iran’s economy and free remaining oil reserves for export or conversion to petrochemicals.” 

Britain also provided Iran with research reactor nuclear capability at the end of the 1950s under the Tehran atomic pact. 

France’s Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, a former prime minister, reportedly remained the most sceptical of the 5+1 ministers intensively involved in the nuclear negotiations. 

The New York Times remains cautious about prospects of success, with its specialist writers observing that “the forces arrayed against a deal are formidable — not just Mr Khamenei and the country’s hardliners, but newly empowered Republicans, some Democrats and many of the United States’s closest allies.”

 The authors further argue that the French had publicly argued for tougher terms in the negotiations and “see their role as to serve, in the words of one Western diplomat, as ‘a significant counterweight on the impulse of ([US President Barack) Obama to make concessions’.”  If so, this is a very curious state of diplomatic affairs.

Among the several reasons the Vienna talks on Iran’s nuclear program have had to be reconvened this month — and now extended into next year — was that France objected to the deal with Iran being closed off earlier because of Tehran’s contested plutonium production plant at Arak.

Whatever doubts the French have over Arak, they seem to be sanguine about Iran’s involvement in uranium enrichment, so much so that they are in industrial partnership with the Iranians in this technology, and have been for four decades since an agreement with the Shah of Iran in 1975.

Oddly, this deal never gets reported in the context of the Iran nuclear negotiations. Is there any good reason why not? It ought to be centre-stage in any public diplomacy, but isn’t.

The origins of the deal are illustrative of the dangers of international nuclear collaboration. 

A joint-stock uranium enrichment consortium, Eurodif, was formed in 1973 with France, Belgium, Spain and Sweden the original shareholders.

In 1975 Sweden’s 10 per cent share in Eurodif was sold to Iran. The French government subsidiary company Cogema (now Areva) and the then Iranian government established the spin-out Sofidif with 60 per cent and 40 per cent shares respectively. 

In turn, Sofidif acquired a 25 per cent share in Eurodif, which gave Iran its 10 per cent share of Eurodif.

The former Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi lent $1 billion and another $180m in 1977 for the construction of the Eurodif factory to have the right to buy 10 per cent of the site’s production. 

Although Iran’s active involvement in Eurodif was halted following the 1979 Iranian revolution, Iran has retained its active involvement in Sofidif — headquartered in Rue La Fayette in Paris — to the present day.

Dr Ali Daee of the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran (AEOI) was appointed Iran’s new permanent representative to Sofidif as recently as September 2012.

 Iran’s stake in Eurodif was exposed in 2007 in a report written by Paris-based German nuclear expert Mycle Schneider for the Greens and the European Free Alliance in the European Parliament.

Fast-forward to November 2014. Cross-bench peer and lawyer Baroness Deech raised the issue of Sofidif in the Lords on October 30 during questions on Iran. 

She received no answer from the minister, Baroness Anelay of St Johns, so she submitted a further written question which received the following reply on November 11: “The AEOI and Areva, a French company, jointly own Sofidif  (which)  in turn has an interest in a uranium enrichment facility in France. 

“The collaboration between AEOI and Areva pre-dates the 1979 revolution in Iran. We do not believe it has a bearing on P5+1 talks with Iran.” 

Really? How convenient. 

The hypocrisy of France, as a nuclear technology supplier to Iran, ganging up on its customer with the other self-appointed permanent five members of the UN security council, along with Germany, would be funny if it wasn’t so serious.

n Dr David Lowry is former director of the European Proliferation Information Centre.